ICMPC9 Accepted Papers http://www.escom-icmpc-2006.org/totaleS.php?pwd=assegnazione&i...
1 of 1 09-04-2007 17:30


AUTHORS:
Joana Cunha e Costa (Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR), Portugues
Catholic University, Porto, Portugal)
Álvaro Barbosa (Music Technology Group Audiovisual Institute Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain)
Daniela Coimbra (Centre for the Study of Music Performance Royal College of Music London, UK)
PRESENTING:
Joana Cunha e Costa
TITLE:
Shared Soundscapes: A social environment for collective music creation
ABSTRACT:
Background The development of internet communication and computer devices leads to the appearance of a
new domain of collective music creation. Both musicians and computer science engineers are working
together in networked music, creating instruments that allow the emergence of what has been titled Shared
Soundscapes (Barbosa, 2003). This collaboration brings out a new conceptual space for musical creation
(Boden, 1990; 1996) that is being explored by these specialists. This new domain offers two very attractive
features, from a creativity point of view. On the one hand its instruments are being built in a user-friendly
way, on Internet. This allows that any interested person in any place can try and indeed be able to create
music. On the other hand, and in accordance with l'esprit du temps, it is made to enable collective creation.
In order to both understand and explore the real possibilities of this conceptual space, we will apply
Csikszentmihalyi’s Systemic Perspective of Creativity (1998). Aims The present paper aims to characterise
the domain of networked music and identify the features that might aid or hinder collective musical creativity.
We will to this by using Csikszentmihalyi concepts of Symbolic Domain, Social Field and Innovative Person
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1998; Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2001). According to this theory, creativity results
from the interaction of these three factors. Providing a set of operational concepts for an integrated
multidimensional analysis, this may well be an useful tool for assessing why creativity may or may not occur
in networked music. Aditionally, to facilitate a deeper understanding of this new domain, we will present a
case study of a networked music instrument: The Public Sound Objects (PSOs - Barbosa; 2002). Main
Contribution This paper is a contribution to the literature on the social psychology of musical creativity. More
specifically, it presents a contribution to the assessment of the social impact of different technological
features on collective creativity in a developing domain. Implications: These new musical instruments
created within the framework of networked music may assume different functional characteristics related to
composition or improvisation, communication and social interaction. We expect that from this work we can
provide some strategies for exploring these characteristics and thus contribute to the development of this
new creative domain.
KEYWORDS:
Musical creativity
Networked music
Collective creation
TOPIC AREAS:
Computational models, Music performance and composition, Social psychology of music,
ORAL PRESENTATION